IT Professionals Want to Embrace Cloud Services, Update IT Infrastructure and Expand Job Roles

RESTON, Va., Nov. 20, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today, (NASDAQ: INAP), a leading-edge provider of high-performance data center and cloud solutions with global network connectivity, announced the results of its annual report, which surveyed more than 500 IT professionals about their organization’s current and future plans for IT infrastructure.

While the majority of IT professionals would give their current IT infrastructure an above average grade, only one in four would say it’s worthy of an “A.” When asked why their infrastructure didn’t receive top marks, the top two reasons were that the infrastructure is not fully optimized for the organization’s applications and the fact that IT professionals are spending too much time managing and maintaining the infrastructure (both at 42 percent).

Additionally, nearly 9 in 10 organizations (88 percent) with on-premise data centers will be moving at least some of their workloads to the cloud, managed hosting or colocation in the next three years. Overall, IT professionals expect a 38 percent reduction in their on-premise workloads by 2022. Where infrastructure is located does have an impact on how IT feels about their systems, as a majority (70 percent) feel that hybrid and multicloud strategies have made management easier to some extent.

With so many organizations migrating their infrastructure, the end for on-premise data centers is likely imminent. The main reasons for this shift are to increase network performance (42 percent), improve scalability (41 percent), improve resiliency/availability (41 percent) and improve security (37 percent).

“The role of the IT professional is changing, and for the second consecutive year, they are making it known that they want to lead digital transformation initiatives,” said Jennifer Curry, INAP SVP of Global Cloud Services. “The results show IT professionals would much rather spend their time assessing their systems for outsourcing (cloud readiness) or designing complex multi-service environments rather than performing routine tasks which can be easily outsourced, such as monitoring their infrastructure. These activities would have a larger business impact and add more value to their organization, so IT leaders should use this as a wake-up call and figure out how to adjust their strategies accordingly.”

Additional findings from INAP’s State of Infrastructure Management Report include:

• The less they manage, the higher the grade: The more companies rely on third parties or cloud providers to fully manage their hosted environments (up to the application layer), the more likely they are to assign their infrastructure strategy an A. The average share of workloads fully managed received the following grades: A (71 percent), B (62 percent), C (54 percent).
• Hybrid IT and multicloud strategies are here to stay: Roughly 7 in 10 organizations (69 percent) already power workloads on more than one platform. Among those who host in the cloud or with managed hosting providers, only 1 in 3 organizations (32 percent) exclusively use one type of hosted environment—e.g., bare metal, private cloud, multitenant public cloud, etc.
• IT frustrations are mounting, but a higher headcount might not be the answer: IT leaders and professionals remain frustrated, and increasingly believe their time required on routine upkeep is holding them back (59 percent). But concerns about their team size or headcount are not the driving factor for this frustration. A majority of IT pros (72 percent) feel their in-house IT teams are large enough to successfully execute their IT infrastructure strategy.

Additional data and analysis, including a comparison in perspectives from senior IT leaders and non-senior IT professionals can be found in INAP’s .

Survey Methodology

The data reflected in this report was derived from a survey of 508 IT professionals with data center, server and cloud infrastructure responsibilities who work at businesses and enterprises in the United States and Canada with greater than 100 employees. The survey, commissioned by INAP and facilitated by Precision Sample, was conducted in October 2019. The margin of error is ±5 percent at the 90 percent confidence level.

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About INAP

Internap Corporation (NASDAQ: INAP) is a leading-edge provider of high-performance data center and cloud solutions with 100 network Points of Presence worldwide. INAP’s full-spectrum portfolio of high-density colocation, managed cloud hosting and network solutions supports evolving IT infrastructure requirements for customers ranging from the Fortune 500 to emerging startups. INAP operates in 21 metropolitan markets, primarily in North America, with 14 INAP Data Center Flagships connected by a low-latency, high-capacity network.

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